


King of Beasts and Shadows

by MistressAkira



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Character Study, Dark, Dark Character, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Hurt, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Non-Graphic Violence, POV Second Person, Post-Time Skip, Pre-Relationship, RIP, Second Chances, Spoilers, Unfortunate Implications, and their supports, and then felix showed up and it was all over for me, but no comfort to be seen, could be read as platonic if you really wanna, during his exhile, feral dimitri brings out the worst in me, for Blue Lions route, of the non-hetero kind, that being said they are not together in this fic and it will be a while longer until they are, this fic idea started with the idea of dima making friends with the strays of garreg mach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 05:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20130253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistressAkira/pseuds/MistressAkira
Summary: The silence waits for you to break it. He’s waiting for you, too.You don’t know what to say. You have no words. All you have left is how you feel.“...You’re really that far gone, aren’t you?” You ask, your voice hard as a glacier despite the quaking of your heart. “What has become of you, Dimitri?”----Felix takes a stroll around the Monastery for the first time in five years, and finds that some things never change. And that others have changed too much.





	King of Beasts and Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> After a stupid long hiatus, I return to my bullshit. New target acquired: angsty bff’s featuring the Feral Cat Man and my new problematic fav, Felix Hugo motherfucking Fraldarius. I just wanna tell y’all that someone telling me about feral Dima getting caught patting the head of one of the war orphans quite literally saved my life. Also, this was originally going to be much fluffier but nah, I’ve got my brand image to maintain. God, this got unexpectedly dark tho...
> 
> Written from Felix’s perspective in the second person, because occasionally I try new things. I also find second person to be an agreeable POV for Felix’s personality, for some reason. XD I finished the Blue Lions route on the Tuesday after the game came out and I’m likely still sleep deprived and mostly dead after marathoning the game, but I had this little drabble idea and I ran with it! BTW, of COURSE I got their paired ending, there are no casual fixations around here. 
> 
> Feel like it’s to be expected but, SPOILERS FOR BLUE LIONS ROUTE AND AND THEIR SUPPORTS.

Garreg Mach Monastery was an eyesore. The imperial invasion had spared nothing and no one, nor had the thieves that followed. 

You would’ve called it a shadow of its former self, but you hardly think there’s even enough structures still left intact to cast them.

Whole sections had collapsed in most buildings, the ancient stones seeming to have simply given up after all this time. Ceilings were but mere skeletons, the broken bones of wooden beams littering the halls and rooms they’d once supported, the walls riddled with stained glass teeth. Once carefully manicured gardens had grown wild and unruly, eating at the foundations of nearby buildings with flowers blooming between the cracks of bricks. Everywhere you looked had been consumed by disuse and decay, looking ready to take a bite out of you too.

You are beset by the memories of your short time here as you pick your way through the rubble your first night back, the gravestone buildings of the old school leering from broken windows as you tread the cobbled paths under the full moon’s glow. In an instant, you are seventeen again, and not once in the five years since have you ever wished to return to that heartbreaking age before now.

It was eerie, being back after all this time. Returning to your old dorm room as well. The dorms had seemingly been spared the worst of it, many still hosting their academy issued furniture and shelves despite the voracious ransacking of the rest of the Monastery. You put all your things back in the same places you had them five years ago- spare swords leaning against the wall behind the door, spats tucked away in the armoire, your collection of daggers laying in wait in the drawers of your desk. This room still looks bare, even when filled with your things. You suppose that hasn’t changed. 

When you’re done unpacking, you flop down upon your old bed and are confounded by an unprecedented nostalgia, staring up at the dusty rafters of your ceiling- still mercifully intact- once again. There is a strange sort of peace you’d became acquainted with up there, the easy way your eyes follow the beams and find solace in the shadows, your teenage emotions and thoughts eternally suspended in this space. How many nights had you familiarized yourself with these corners, laying awake for one reason or another?

_ Far, far too many, _you think as you force yourself up. There was nothing memorable about this bed, least of all the thoughts you've had while in it. And this is not what you want to be doing right now. 

You did not return here to daydream about your bygone school days. You were here out of duty to your country, your title. You were here for-

_ Him._

_ Up, _You command yourself as you rise from the bed. These thoughts were pointless, and seeking them out served no purpose other than to put yourself in a foul mood. You don your boots and grab your sword belt from where you’d disposed of it upon the desk, and leave your room. 

You think you’ll go to the training grounds, burn some moonlight until you can barely stand, let alone think. The grounds are but a straight shot from the boys’ dorms, however you instead find yourself walking the opposite direction, meandering towards the greenhouse and fishing pond. It would have seemed that not just the dorms but most of the residential parts of the Monastery had escaped the worst of the desolation, the dock and fishing shack still intact as well, the ornate glass of the greenhouse sparkling in the moon instead of on the ground.

You pause at the edge of the fishing pond, a myriad of memories swirling through your mind as you watch your reflection flickering in the currents in the moonlit water. 

You recall the outrageous fishing competition hosted for Flayn after her kidnapping. Everyone had eaten fish for _ weeks _ afterwards- and after that, hardly anyone had the rest of the year. And so near the greenhouse, you also remember how fond Dedue was of plants, the handful of occasions you’d had to seek him out for one reason or another leading to finding him amid the gentle domesticated wilderness of the glasshouse. More than once you’d gotten roped into helping that behemoth water plants or weed the gardens, and it never ceased to surprise you how gentle he was with the little sprouts. Those memories somehow feel more significant now, knowing you’ll never see the man again. 

You end up standing here awhile, letting your thoughts percolate in the darkness of the fishing pond, eventually deciding you’ll end up at the training grounds at some point tonight. There was no harm in a stroll, really. If anything, it’d kill more time.

Once you find it within yourself to continue, you walk for some time, taking in the sights and sounds of the Monastery at night, breathing in the cool Ethereal Moon air. This time five years ago, you all were caught up in the pomp and circumstance of the Winter Ball; another memory you feel odd reexamining now, recalling it with nostalgia despite having been so thoroughly disinterested at the time. 

Your father had to send you the finery you’d purposely left back at home in hopes of having an out if such an occasion arose. You’d dutifully forced yourself through a few waltzes with Ingrid and one disastrous Srengese Quickstep with Annette just to have said you did, but remember spending most of the ball standing in a corner of the ballroom, stuffy and uncomfortable and wishing very much to have been swinging your sword instead of rejecting the invitations of girls you couldn’t care less about. But you also remember Claude grabbing your professor and whisking him out into the middle of the dance floor, to everyone’s cheers and laughter. It was the only time you’ve ever seen your unflappable professor blush. A small vindication you’d clung to after all those unnecessarily intimate tea parties.

As you walk, you realize that for all the ways the Monastery has changed, there were indeed ways it had not. Abandoned and desolate as it had been left, it still teemed with life. The surviving knights of Seiros had spared no time reinstalling themselves into the Monastery, the evidence of their homecoming everywhere you look- chimneys smoking steadily despite the hour, shoes left on mats outside doors, candles in every window, a light always on somewhere offering guidance should one only seek it out. 

And the _ beasts. _Garreg Mach had always been run amok by strays of every kind- animal and human alike- but as the Monastery de-domesticated the past few years, the number of animals seemed to have quadrupled. 

There’d always been cats under foot, dogs howling late at night. The occasional peacock in the rafters, or clan of bats in the belfry. But now, they seemed to have taken the whole of Garreg Mach for their own, the wounded buildings offering ample space for invasion. Birds nests of every size and shape now decorated most eves, woven through with bright streaks of blue, yellow, and red, and upon every flat surface, a cat sat, grooming itself, napping, or simply staring at you as you pass by, their gemstone eyes impassive in the dark. The coo of peacocks is an endless drone in the distance, as are the chirps and caws of other unidentified animal throats. 

Ahead of you, you spot a lovely wolfhound that wags its tail as you approach, and you cannot help but pat the creature upon the head once you reach it. Though you’d never been fond of animals, you had an appreciation for some of them after many years of hobbyist hunting. You even kept a small pack of hunting dogs back home for such purposes. Sometimes it required a beast to take down another one- your fine collection of boar and leopard heads mounted above your father’s mantel agreed to that.

Eventually, the dog tires of your attention, and turns to trot away. Without fully intending to, you begin to trail after it, mindlessly following the hound as it makes its way through the gazebo gardens, the dining and entrance halls. You follow it until the next thing you know, you’ve found yourself upon the stairs to the ruined cathedral.

The vast building still rose high into the night, but stood with none of the regal bearing it had once before. Specific attention must have been given to its destruction, but you wouldn’t have expected anything less from Edelgard. The stained glass windows, detailed with saints and miracles, laid in shatters, the brick walls burned and singed, iron bars of the gate warped and twisted beyond recourse. Piles of rubble drenched the stairs, the sidewalks, the bridge, stone and plaster shards the fragmented bones of the once grand building. 

You’d never spent much time here. Service wasn’t mandatory for the students, not even on Sundays, so you’d never had a purpose to go. But your heart is still quaking under the weighty sight of the wreckage, and you’ve begun to realize how you hadn’t cared about any of these things until they were broken beyond recognition. 

You hear a creak and look up to see the hound nosing open one of the huge wooden doors, disappearing into the church with a flick of its wagging tail. Curiosity gets the better of you, and you find yourself following it once again, the soft clinking of your sword belt accompanying you as you ascend the stairs and push your own way inside.

Immediately, all your senses are assaulted by the dust. It confounds them, clouding your eyes and lungs, and you can taste the dead stone in the back of your throat as you try to stifle a cough. You rub your eyes with a gloved hand, attempting to loosen the grit’s grip from your face, but only succeed in finding the knitted remains of a cobweb you must have unknowingly headbutted in your hair. You do you best it brush it all aside, and when you open your eyes again, you expect it will take a moment for them to adjust but are surprised find yourself squinting against the light, your vision whole and white in the ruined cathedral. 

It is a giant chasm in the ceiling you find at fault for this.

As if a meteor had crashed through it- and perhaps it had, knowing the Adrestians’ penchant for dark magic- a giant hole now decimates the high ceilings of the main cathedral, the remains of the mortal entry wound found in the tower of rubble now dominating most of the sermon floor, heinous and ugly as a corpse pile. Through that cleft bright moonlight filters in, dousing the chapel in blue shadows and somber white light, the swooping, tittering shapes of bats chasing the beams into the darkness like bugs. 

You rub your eyes again before daring to take another step forward, eyes flicking about as you access the space. Rows of once stalwart pews lay in splinters strewn across the cracked marble floors, the tall stone pillars that upheld the ceiling doing so halfheartedly in their fractured, crumbling states, encircled in the lengthy arms of climbing ivy. Rugs and tapestries languished limply in tatters, the torn and frayed ends evidence of the animals’ aggressive occupation. There are several white Seiros flags still flying, as well as the remains of the Black Eagle and Golden Deer flags, but the Blue Lion pennant is strangely absent, only the torn top portion of the flag clinging to where it had once hung from the ceiling. As if the whole thing had been ripped down by a particularly violent hand.

Ahead the wolfhound pads down the aisle, picking around the detritus and debris gracefully, a creature well at home among the ruins. Halfway down it glances back over its shoulder at you, lupine yellow eyes dead on yours as if to say, _ You’ve made it this far. Don’t you want to see? _

You don’t know what it is you want to see. But you follow it as it leads you deeper into the church all the same.

When you reach the sermon floor you spot a dark shape amidst the rubble, hunched over before the piled remains of the ceiling, features eclipsed by the intensity of the moonlight. The wolfhound trots right up to the figure, butting its head into the shape’s side affectionately, to which they respond with a pat to the dog’s broad chest. Coming closer, you see the sermon floor dotted with the curled forms of other creatures as well- a fat orange cat perched upon the remains of a fallen column, a spotted mutt dozing in the moonlight- among others, all contentedly gathered around the figure.

Closer still, you find features you recognize in the form upon the floor. Blond mane, broad shoulders, lanky frame draped in the flayed skins of beasts haphazardly stitched to the blue shock what you are now certain to be absent Lions pennant. 

It is the boar.

He sits among the desolation with his long legs stretched out, black armor catching the moonlight like a knife, and there is a strange mewling sound that seems to be coming from his vicinity you are uncertain the source of until you draw close enough to peer over his shoulder. 

While there is no discernible expression on his face, but there is something undeniably tender in the gentle way he handles the squirming wolf whelps in his lap, corralling them with care as they waddle and roll about on their weak legs, young eyes freshly open. They are all the same shade of dark gray the wolfhound is, and so very small, easily fitting in the palms of the boar’s black gloved hands. To crush them it would take but a flex of his fingers, yet they step through his palms and explore the ground between his legs uninhibited by fear. The wolfhound, too, is completely at ease, settled contentedly at his side as her pups play under his watchful eye. 

Your close approach has drawn the attention of the other animals present, golden, green, and brown eyes fixing upon you from the darkness, and as if in-tuned with their instinct, you glance back down to find your prince’s attention attuned to you as well.

His lone blue eye drifts up to meet your gaze like a corpse staggering from its grave, staring at you dispassionately from under that rat’s nest his hair has become, and you try to stare back into that ice cold eye but find yourself sucked into the black void of his eye patch instead. It is a stark, dark reminder upon his face, the shadows clinging to his countenance now more than just the ghosts of sleepless nights, but real, true emptiness you’d long thought you understood.

You had seen it when you first reunited- he’d lived here alone, in this empty place, for four whole, _ bloody _ years. Of course some of that would have found its way inside him. But you’d seen it before, too, back in your academy days, that shallow gaze, collecting spite the way a puddle collects rainwater, inevitably overflowing, inevitably becoming _ too much_, the shadows he tried to contain feasting on his light and leaving nothing but this hollow creature behind.

You saw it, just as you see it in him as he was now, a bloodstained, filthy, downright _ feral _ animal on the floor_. _A beastly king, holding court over his wild subjects. A boar, all guts and brashness, bloody-tusked and wild-eyed. 

You’ve seen him. It's been five years, but it might as well have been yesterday. 

You see him, and you think:

_ This is exactly what you are._

There is no vindication in this realization. Just as there was none five years ago, in the tombs below the Monastery, as you’d all bore witness to Dimitri snapping Edelgard’s- the Flame Emperor’s- soldiers’ necks with all the glee and ease of a child snapping sticks.

You sometimes wonder if tragedy had made him like this, or if it’d only drug out what had always been there. Dimitri was but a collection of broken pieces pretending to be a person, but once upon a time he’d been able to pass this handsome lie, so long as you weren’t looking for the cracks.

Now, the cracks have become all you can see. And underneath was only the beast.

You think of the toothed dagger you have in the top drawer of your desk. He’d given it to you, many years ago, several years after the debacle with the foreign girl they’d all teased him about well into their academy days. He’d given it to you when you were both fourteen, a year after the tragedy, a year before the rebellion. He’d blushed. You teased him. He’d been giving you daggers for years- half your collection was from him- this wasn’t anything special, but it was _important, _because you thought that maybe things were going back to normal. That this painful in between would be all that it would ever be.

How many boars had you killed with that knife? You’d begun using it only for that purpose, after the rebellion, your weapon of choice against your least favorite prey. It was your own weakness that had you tucking it into your luggage when you came to the officer’s academy, back when you were seventeen. What had you hoped to do with it, you wonder? You were embarrassingly beside yourself in panic when you’d lost it later that year, but managed to play it off casually when your professor returned it to you.

You’d wondered many times before if you’d ever have the guts to put the boar down one day, if you had to. _ Would you do it with that dagger? _ You’d ask yourself. _ Would you do it with your hands?_

_ Could you do it at all?_

“It’s you.” You eventually say, summoning your voice into this empty space.

He returns only silence, eyeing you up as he strokes the ears of one of the little wolf pups wriggling in his lap. The emptiness of his gaze doesn’t match the attentiveness of his actions. He doesn’t seem human. He doesn’t even seem _sentient_.

Bitterness coils within you, deep and vicious as poison. It’s _painful_, to feel this way again. You used to feel this way every day when you were seventeen. You hate how easy it is to drink it again. 

“How fitting,” You say, disgust dripping from your voice. “To find the boar prince among its beastly brethren. So this is really what has become of the future king. I’ve always known what you are, but somehow I’m still surprised at the depths you’ve fallen to in your depravity.”

You don’t entirely expect him to reply, and the brittle chuckle the boar suddenly admits rocks you to the core.

“It’s true,” The Dimitri-shaped creature rasps, his voice jagged, rough as a whetstone. It sounds like he hasn’t spoken in years. He probably hadn’t. “You saw what’d I’d become long before anyone else had. I’d never been able to lie to you.” Another chuckle, mirthless and dark. His narrowed eye on you is frightening. You fight the urge to look away. “You were too precious to me, even after it all.”

You grit your teeth, and feel it sliding down your throat. This poison. This passion. This long-festering fear that _this was all it would ever be_. It’s _his_ shadow that’s haunted you these long five years, and you hate him for it, but you hate what’s been done to him more.

“Are you trying to _ congratulate _ me?” You spit, your hands in fists that you would’ve thrown in a heartbeat if you weren’t terrified of touching him. “Admonish the fact that I, alone, saw you for the walking corpse you’d been since Duscur? Like it was a secret? Like it was a prize? You think I _ like _ being right?!” You shake your head, shake out your hands. “Save your empty words, boar prince. You don’t care about me, or anyone else. If you ever did at all.”

You thought his gaze was frozen before, but as those words leave your tongue, the ice hardens completely, cold as a Faerghus winter.

“Get out.” He growls, a rusted razor’s edge in his voice, warning you to stay back, to stay away.

You sneer, and take another step forward. “You are not king yet, boar. Corpses have no control over me.” 

You don’t want to be near him, you don’t, and you don't know what you’re going to do, you just-

“I said GET OUT!” 

You freeze, blood hammering through your veins with the force of warhorses. Above you, a catastrophe of fluttering erupts as a dozen birds take off into the night, and you feel every wingbeat in your skin as you stare at him, the echoes of his outburst squeezing all the air out of your lungs. You feel surrounded. Even as the silence settles, and the soft whimpering of the whelps refills the space, all you can hear is his fury, his command. His eye is still fixated upon you, but it has glazed over and there is nothing but madness behind it now. 

“I will not hesitate to run you through. Though you still wouldn’t make much of a feast, there are many creatures here in need of satiation. Beasts must rely on one another, mustn’t they?” His voice is but a soft whisper, but it lays against you like a blade, a gentle press foretelling a much more gruesome death if you so much as moved an inch. “I’ve made companions of more shadows in the past four years than you could ever dream of. The things they tell me, it’d make you sick." 

Then he grins, a savage snarl of teeth you’ve seen grace his handsome face more times in the past seven years than a real smile. "But, oh, they suit me just fine. They like the way heads look impaled upon my lance just as I do.”

He is so quiet. You can’t even hear his breathing. You can only stare at it, at him. You can’t speak. You don’t know what you’re seeing anymore. 

You thought there would be no shadows here that you didn’t know, no shadows left in this broken, empty place you hadn’t already confronted. You don’t know darkness. You don’t know that you’re seeing anymore. You don’t know him.

The silence waits for you to break it. He’s waiting for you, too. 

You don’t know what to say. You have no words. All you have left is how you feel. 

“...You’re really that far gone, aren’t you?” You ask, your voice hard as a glacier despite the quaking of your heart. “What has become of you, Dimitri?” 

His name slips from your lips and you think nothing of it. He in turn chuckles that frigid, fragile laugh again, the sound but an echo from the dark well it came from.

“... Did you know that you haunted me, too? Even after all these years, I could still remember your voice perfectly. I don’t altogether remember mother’s face, or father’s laugh, but your voice… I could recall with perfect clarity.” 

He hums, eye drifting closed as he tilts his head to the side, rough voice reverent.“_ Oh... _the things you’d tell me…”

A shiver runs through you. Something cold and warm at the same time. You want to cut it out with a knife.

_Is it me you're speaking to... Or is Glenn? Which do you want it to be? _

_Who's ghost are you courting? _

“I can’t stand the sight of you any longer.” You snarl and look away, making to go. You want to be anywhere but here. You want to be anything but seventeen again.“Lay with your dogs. Rise with the fleas, for all I care. I’m leaving.”

But he doesn’t respond. When you glance back over your shoulder, he’s not even looking at you. He’s still sitting there, head cocked with that strangely serene expression on his face, entranced by some distant sound only he can hear.

You don’t try to draw any conclusion from the silence. There is no point in guessing. 

You turn to go, and make it a fair bit of a ways down the aisle before a soft whimper catches your ears. You turn once more to see the boar has broken free of whatever spell possessed him, and was now back to staring at the pups in his lap. One is chewing on his finger, and he lets it. He doesn’t notice you staring again. Either that, or he doesn’t care.

Behind him, the wolfhound watches you from her place at his side. _ What do you think? _ Her cold yellow eyes query. _ What did you want to see? _

What _ had _ you wanted to see? You have even less of an idea than before.

But through all the horrible things that had happened, and all the horrid things you imagined happening, you’d never really thought there would once be a day you'd be missing having both of those bright blue eyes on you.

But you never cared until things are broken beyond recognition. The boar prince’s remaining eye reminds you of this cruelly.

And what do you think? You suppose Dimitri’s insides match his outsides now. But there are things you can’t yet put to words. Things you can’t yet say. Looking at the way he lets those whelps walk over him, how he guides them back to safety without ever denying them exploration, you are reminded of the church orphans he used to teach fencing to back in the Academy, the children he watched play at the market with that wistful expression on his face.

You think there may yet be something of the boy he once was underneath. It’s deep, and long buried, but it’s there. You don’t know what it will take to bring it back, but you will try to hold out for it, and wait until then. 

It is your duty. As his Shield. As his subject. As his best friend.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @mistressakiraart and @depressed-princess-ess


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